screening

screening
Action taken by uninformed parties to induce other people with private information to act so as to reveal it. This can be done by second-degree price discrimination, where people are offered a choice of contracts, and information about their characteristics can be inferred from which contract they choose. Screening is contrasted with signalling, where people with private information take actions which they hope will convey this information to parties who would otherwise not possess it, or induce them to believe statements they would otherwise have no means of checking. In many cases, such as the job market, both screening and signalling occur.